As concrete signs of budget cuts at the University solidify and the loss of faculty becomes more likely, students will find fewer options when scheduling classes. Course offerings are determined by each academic department based on the demand for courses and the faculty on hand, said University Registrar Robert Doolos. But when faculty is reduced, courses will be offered less often and to larger classes. ‘It all depends on the faculty availability, which determines what sections they’ll offer and how many sections they’ll offer,’ Doolos said. ‘That decision is made at the departmental level and is driven by the faculty resources they have on hand.’ The combination of fewer available faculty members and an increasing number of students will make course offerings difficult to determine, said Stacia Haynie, vice provost of Academic Affairs. ‘If you have declining faculty and increasing students – and we are certainly wanting to recruit to capacity – and cuts come in, and our faculty capacity is reduced while we worked diligently to increase students, there’s a problem,’ Haynie said. Haynie said budget cuts will also eliminate the ‘degrees of freedom’ in course scheduling. The University will lose the ability to add courses based on semester-specific student demand. ‘We might need to find an instructor to teach an additional course or a lawyer who might teach constitutional law on occasion,’ Haynie said. ‘We won’t have those funds. Those are courses we add to meet student demand.’ Small classes will also take a hit after losing faculty, Haynie said. With fewer faculty on hand, academic departments will have to evaluate whether they prefer to make class sections larger or prevent some students from taking the course. ‘At what point does [increasing class size] become debilitating to the students in that class?’ she said. ‘That will vary [from] discipline to discipline. You make a choice about whether it’s larger or whether a student won’t get it in a particular semester because pedagogically you can’t [fit them in].’ Increased class size would also cause a logistical problem, Doolos said. If sections become larger, there will be more pressure on the limited number of large classrooms the University has to offer. Doolos said one solution is to offer more classes outside of ‘prime time’ – the times of day most faculty and students want to hold classes. Each academic department is allowed to schedule no more than 55 percent of its courses during prime time. Doolos said if faculty members are lost, departments have two options to create a workable schedule with the classrooms available – offer more classes outside of prime time, or reduce class enrollment to fit into a smaller room. The second option is worse, Doolos said. ‘That’s the one that really hurts,’ he said. ‘That’s the one that you don’t want to happen if you can avoid it, because that is having a direct impact on the number of students in those classes.’ Haynie said if course offerings are reduced, students should plan ahead and think about schedules further in the future than only the next semester by meeting with an academic counselor. ‘The counselors and advisers are the ones who have that institutional knowledge and memory to help students,’ she said. ‘They have expertise and experience when it comes to building course schedules.’ Haynie said students should also consider summer school because the schedule for that session is determined by the amount of demand observed for various courses during the fall and spring. The course schedule for fall 2010 is already built, Haynie said, and changes will depend on the final result of the next fiscal year’s budget cuts. ‘What we have built, we believe will be able to meet the student demands. But that depends on the strength of our faculty, so we will not know about the changes until we see the budget on July 1.’ — Contact Ryan Buxton at [email protected]